Full Album Stream: Vuohi – “Witchcraft Warfare”

“From chaos we born.” So begins a written statement from Finnish extreme metal goat-lords Vuohi. Beginning as a grindcore faction back in 2002, they’ve slowly mutated into an outfit unbeholden to subgenre expectations. “We realized that we wanted to operate on much wider fields of metal music, and the same happened lyric-wise,” the band shares. “The limitations were chopped off and our musical spectrum started evolving towards Black Metal.”

But Witchcraft Warfare—the band’s official debut after several demos and a split EP—isn’t a desperately-conjured blur of icy tremolos from a band seeking a fresh start. The record’s a multi-faceted weapon against musical stagnation. Every song slyly invokes extreme metal’s varied history without feeling derivative. The industrial churn of opener “The Rain” rides a rumbling bass line as the song crawls like an AmRep crusher that escaped from Hades. The title track rips from the previous song’s dissonance into blast beats and gore metal dual-vocals. Depending on the riff, “Arsonist Dreams” feels like it could have been written in Gothenburg’s 1996 melodeath boom, or in Germany at the peak of Teutonic thrash. An atmospheric gloom intermittently creeps into compositions, but Vuohi don’t permit the mood to endure or define their blackened approach. They slash through the melancholia with scorching riffs and searing new lyrical purpose.

“Simply said, Witchcraft Warfare is a result of natural improvement, even though it is the band’s debut album,” Vuohi write. “The lyrical themes have been brewing in the mind of the band’s lyricist for years. Since the group’s self-released The Rising Era of Goat (2010) 10-track assault the anti-religious themes took a more important role on the lyrics. Although melancholic inner-struggles, depression and particularly war were still in the focus, too. Therefore, it was quite natural to deepen the lyrical aspects on Witchcraft Warfare and take occultist topics along and pour them into darker folklore, along with mysticism and mythologies of North European peoples—especially of Finno-Ugric and Scandinavian ones.”

Join Vuohi’s battle against musical stagnation by listening to Witchcraft Warfare before the album’s November 9th release date from Saturnal Records. Press play, and enter Vuohi’s cathedral of runes and riffs.